Ellery Queen - A Fine and Private Place

The question of how the killer gained entrance to the building without being seen was open. The elderly night security guard, an ex-New York City policeman named Gallegher, swore up and down and sidewise that no one unknown to him had got past him. On the other hand, it was a large building, he could not have been everywhere at once, and the detectives agreed that a determined intruder could have managed, by patient observation and the seizure of an opportunity, to slip by Gallegher unseen.

To have gained entry to the penthouse apartment without leaving a trace, the detectives reasoned, the industrialist’s killer might have been either admitted by a confederate inside or provided with a key to the front door, which was equipped with a tamper-proof lock of special manufacture. A preliminary investigation of the household staff was begun, and a broad locksmith search was ordered on the possibility that a duplicate key had been made.

If the murder and suicide of Julio and Marco Importunato had registered on the seismographs of the world’s financial centers, the murder of the head of Importuna Industries-the senior and last-surviving brother-rocked them wildly. The securities shock was felt over most of the globe-in New York, London, Paris, Antwerp, Brussels, Zurich, Berlin, Vienna, Athens, Cairo, Hong Kong, Tokyo, even in southern and eastern Africa, where Importuna capital was substantially invested. Two paperback biographies of the murdered industrialist sprouted on the racks and newsstands within three weeks of his death. National Educational Television convoked a roundtable of bankers and economists to discuss the probable long-term effects of Importuna’s departure from the money marts of the world. Sunday newspaper supplements indulged in lurid, largely fanciful, detail about his beginnings, his private life, and his rocket rise into the stratosphere of industrial power.

And overnight his widow became the most written-and talked-about woman on earth, a preeminence she was to maintain for over a year, until Mrs. John F. Kennedy became Mrs. Aristotle Socrates Onassis. It was not only because of the fact that the brutal murder of her husband had made Virginia Whyte Importuna (as one female wit put it, “in nine fell swoops”) one of history’s wealthiest women. She was also, indisputably, one of the most photogenic. Her cheekbones caught shadows that hollowed her face into a lovely mask of tragedy, and her great light-colored eyes in some photographs gave her an unearthly look.

The mixture of unique riches and unusual beauty was irresistible. The national women’s magazines tore down their dummies and substituted Virginia Importuna features for earliest possible publication; morgues were ransacked for photos; 99 East was besieged day and night by pleas for interviews and sittings with famous photographers and illustrators. The frenzied demands of the media so interfered with the police investigation that the widow was persuaded to authorize the hiring of an agency to receive and process the requests that poured in.

But if the gorgeous survivor was the object of importunities, speculation, and gossip (some of it predictably vicious), the ugly victim who had so brutally departed was the even greater target of public curiosity. The man who had shunned publicity in life became an international byword in death. This was sparked by his sensational murder and fueled by the details of his superstition, delivered daily by the media.

It was a reporter for the New York Daily News who dubbed Nino Importuna “The 9 Man,” and a columnist for the New York Post (on the same day) who christened the Importuna case “The 9 Murder.” Both phrases caught on, and soon they were in general use. (Even The New York Times, in one follow-up story in its city edition, allowed the epithets to show. They were hastily routed from the regular edition.)

For Nino Importuna, that most practical of men, it was written and said, had throughout his dollars-pounds-francs-lire life clung to a curious, fanatical, illogical belief in the mysterious power of an abstraction. It was a number, the number 9, Importuna’s totem, his life sign, his trademark, as the elephant had served a similar function for e.e. cummings, one erudite commentator pointed out. The late industrialist had made of the number 9 an axle about which revolved virtually every spoke of his existence.

“All right,” Inspector Queen said fitfully. “I’ll discuss it with you. Spout away if you have to. But don’t expect me to buy it, Ellery. I’m up to here in trouble on this case. I’m not about to make a jackass of myself with this baloney about magic numbers.”

“Did I use the word magic ?” Ellery protested. “I merely said that for once the newspapers are justified, I mean in leaning on this 9 thing of Importuna’s. How can you overlook it, dad? It was central to his character.”

“Is it going to help nail his killer is what I’m interested in,” his father grumbled. “Well, is it?”

“I don’t know. It might very well, in the end.”

The Inspector implored heaven with his eyebrows. “Well, go! I said I’d listen.”

“Let’s start at the start. Nino’s start. He was born when? September 9, 1899. The 9th day of the 9th month.”

“Big deal.”

“And the year 1899 is a multiple of 9.”

“A what?”

“The number 1899 can be divided by 9 evenly.”

“So what?”

“Next: Add the digits of 1899, 1 plus 8 plus 9 plus 9, and what do you get? 27. 27 is also a multiple of 9. And if you add together the two digits of 27-2 and 7-you get 9 again.”

“Ellery, for heaven’s sake.”

“Well, don’t you?”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Importuna was. Exactly what started him on this lifelong obsession with 9s we’ll probably never dig out. Maybe it was the 9-ness of his birth date, and/or the fact that he happened to be born with 9 fingers instead of the regulation 10. Or something significant, possibly traumatic, could have happened to him on, say, his 9th birthday. Whatever it was, once it took hold it never let go of this tough, cold-blooded businessman.

“You can’t overlook the strength of the grip it had on him when you realize that he went so far as to change his family name. Family and everything pertaining to it are matters of tremendous pride to the Italian contadino. Yet Nino dropped the last two letters out of his surname and legally became Importuna-something, I point out, his two brothers absolutely refused to do. Why Nino Importuna instead of Nino Importunato? That’s not a very drastic change. It’s hardly a change at all. Yet to Nino it obviously had great meaning. Why? Because it turned an 11-letter name into a name of 9 letters!

“Don’t keep shaking your head, dad. It sounds silly to you, but it didn’t to Importuna. There’s something here, something important. I know it. I feel it… Take his first name. What was it?”

“What was it? Nino!”

“Wrong. Tullio. I took the trouble to have it looked up. When he petitioned the court to allow him to change his surname from Importunato to Importuna, he petitioned at the same time to change his Christian name from Tullio to Nino. Tullio is what he was christened in the tiny church in his hometown in Italy. I cabled a private investigation agency in Rome to get the information. Tullio. Why did he have it changed to Nino?”

“Nino,” the Inspector said, sucked in in spite of himself. “N-i-n-o. That’s pretty close to n-i-n-e. Does Nino mean 9 in Italian?… What am I jabbering about!”

“No, Nino doesn’t mean 9 in Italian. In Italian it means child. The word for 9 is nove. ”

“Is there an Italian Christian name that starts with N-o-v-e?”